Computers that display websites via the world wide web on the Internet typically enable users to tag a piece of information (“content”), to enable that piece to be easily retrieved in future, using the tag. Users can describe or categorize a piece of content or a bookmark on a prior art website, using any terminology they determine to be most appropriate for the content piece being tagged.
Websites are now global in nature, generating and using web based content in multiple languages. However on many websites, tagging is supported in only a single language, such as in the English language on delicious.com, meaning that any piece of content can be tagged using English language tags. As several such English-only websites do not allow pieces of content to be tagged in a language other than English, this limitation hinders effective use by non-English users.
Furthermore, pieces of content in the form of transactional data of an enterprise cannot be tagged at an external website like delicious.com, because such transactional data is typically confidential to the enterprise and not accessible outside of an enterprise application.
As users can input any string of characters as a tag, it is possible for users to supply a string of non-English language text as the tag, e.g. if the tag can be expressed using the English Alphabet letters A-Z. For example, FIG. 1 illustrates a portion of a webpage 100 in which an article with title 101 entitled “Water is a Key Issue in Iraqi Election” has been tagged using tags in two languages, namely English language tags 111E-114E and French language tags 111F-114F. However, in prior art webpage 100 shown in FIG. 1, the English language tags 111E-114E and the French language tags 111F-114F are comingled and displayed together in a single line 110 immediately below title 101. Note that line 110 in webpage 100 includes the word “TAGS” and a colon “:” preceding the tags 111E-114E and 111F-114F thereby to visually separate title 101 from tags 111E-114E and 111F-114F.
Although bilingual tags 111E-114E and 111F-114F make title 101 equally accessible to users who speak the two languages French and English, this title 101 is not as easily accessible in other languages, such as Spanish, as there are no Spanish language tags in line 110. As users all over this world who may visit a website can speak in over 20 languages, the current inventors believe that inclusion of tags in each of the 20 languages makes it impractical to display tags in webpage 100 of the type shown in FIG. 1, i.e. in a single line 110. The current inventors further note that displaying multi-lingual tags (in over 20 languages) could result in multiple lines of tags (e.g. 10 lines). The current inventors further note that display of numerous lines of multi-lingual tags makes tagging impractical, as each user needs to visually search for tags that the user recognizes in their own language, because (as per webpage 100 in FIG. 1) tags in different languages are comingled, in all prior art known to the inventors.